To the Editors:
In “The Fortunes of Formalism” (April 2005), David Yezzi claims that Columbia recently cut the prosody course. He is a little off on that. Columbia just brought back the prosody course in response to student demand. I know. I took it last semester. One thing I noticed in that course was that the authors of many recent articles and books about formal verse spend a lot of time essentially pleading for the reader to give formalism a chance. This seems totally unneccessary to me. A lot of my classmates at Columbia are very interested in prosody and formal verse. I am. It has been such a long time since the iambic line was thrust off our shoulders that formal verse now seems new and exciting and strange. It is time to stop defending formalism. It really does not need it.
Samuel Amadon
New York, New York
